I’ve commented on this blog before about the possibly questionable quality of some digital remasters released of late. Common subjective complaints in online fan and hifi forums, made myself both here and among friends in person, are that some particular remasters might be too loud, too bright, and/or otherwise “overdone” given what we know or perceive of the original source material. There might well be various artistic or marketing-related reasons for this, so I’m not here to argue for or against these issues.

Further complicating the issue for me, both as a fan and a professional, is that many of these stand-out features are seen overwhelmingly as positive things by many fans, whether they are technically correct or not. It would seem that a combination of perceived increase in detail and volume outweighs any issues of listening fatigue or known certain deviation from the presentation of the original master.

I’ve embarked professionally on remastering and restoration processes and have learned, from the coal-face so to speak, much of the reality of what’s involved. To onlookers it appears to be a black art – and believe me, from the inside, it can feel a lot like it too! Sometimes I’m asked by a client or a reference-listener how or why I made a particular decision; and in some cases, especially those without actual technically verifiable information or logged conversations to go on, I have to go out on a limb and essentially say something to the effect of “well, because it ‘felt right'”, or “because it brings out the guitar *here*, which really flatters the piece” or some other abstract quantity. At this point I just have to hope the client agrees. If they don’t, it’s no big disaster, I am rarely emotionally tied to the decision. I just need to pick up on the feedback, do what I can with it, and move on. Looking at the process, I guess that’s partly why the word “abstract” appears in my trading name! 🙂

“Okay, so you know a bit about this from both sides, on with the subject already!”

There are two particular commercial albums in my digital collection, both hugely successful upon their original release, whose most recent remasters have bothered me. It’s not fair to name and shame them, especially not while I await confirmation from engineers/labels that my hunch is correct. Anyways – I’m bothered not because they’re “bad” per se, but because I bought them, took them home, and from the moment I first heard them, something about them stood out to me as being not quite “right” from a technical perspective. One of them (Album A) was released in 2001, and another (Album B) that was released earlier this year, in 2015.

What these two albums have in common is that their tonal and dynamic balance is *significantly* different to the original releases, beyond the usual remastering techniques involved with repair, restoration and sweetening of EQ and dynamics carried out to sit alongside contemporary new releases. The giveaway is that the top-end is both much brighter than usual, and much more compressed – and the result is unnecessarily fatiguing.

Where the two albums differ, then:

Album A has not suffered from the “loudness wars”.

Its overall dynamics are relatively untouched compared with the original.

It appears, looking at the waveform in a DAW, that the album material has been normalised to 0dBFS (so it fills the maximum dynamic range CD has to offer), but it rarely hits such high levels.

Album B however, despite never having been a “loud” album on original release, has suffered from the “loudness wars”.

Looking at its waveform, it’s clear that it has been maximised; this means that the material has been both compressed and limited such that the original dynamics have been squashed and gain applied such that almost the entire album waveform hits the 0dBFS point.

As a result, the album has lost its previous tidal ebb and flow, and while arguably some details are indeed much more audible than before, it no longer has the organic subtlety it once did. Important instrumental details get masked and actually reduced in level as louder ones come into the foreground, because with that much compression going on, there’s nowhere else for them to go except lower in level.

Sure, it’ll play better on an iPod while travelling on the London Underground, or in the car, so it might open up a new market that way – but for the rest of us perhaps looking forward to a better quality transfer to listen to at home or anywhere else, we don’t get that choice.

I’ve heard the 2015 vinyl re-release of the latter album, and it seems to not have the same issues – or if it does, nowhere near to the same extremity. There are likely good technical and human reasons for that, but that’s an aside for another post.

Experiment 1: Treating the common issues

Last week I had some downtime, and a hunch – a dangerous combination.

Neither album was famed in its day for brightness, except for the singer’s sibilants in Album A causing vinyl cutting and playback some serious headaches if alignment wasn’t quite right. Album B does carry a lot of detail in the top end, but being mostly synthetic, and certainly not a modern-sounding album, the spectral content is much more shifted toward low-mid than anything we’d be producing post-1990. So there will be some sheen and sparkle, but it should never be in your face, and never compressed.

Such clues told me two things: first, that Dolby A was likely not decoded from the master-tape on transfer; next, that in the case of Album B, further dynamic compression has taken place on top of the un-decoded material.

So – out came a Dolby A decoder, and through it I fed a signal from each album in turn, bouncing the decoded signal back into my DAW for storage and further analysis of the decoded signals. Now please understand, it’s hard (if not impossible) to get a correct level-alignment without getting the test tones from the master tape, but those of us in the know can make some basic assumptions based on known recording practices of the time, and once we know what to listen for, we can also based on the audible results, especially if we have a known-good transfer from the original tape to work with.

All that said, I’m not claiming here that even with all this processing and educated guesswork, I’m able to get back to the actual sound of the original tape! But I am able to get closer to what it ought to sound like…

The result? Instantly, for both albums, the top-end was back under control – and strangely both albums were suddenly sounding much more like the previous versions I’ve been hearing, be it from vinyl, CD or other sources. Album B’s synth percussion had space between the hits, Album A’s live drums had proper dynamics and “room” space. In both albums, stereo positioning was actually much more distinct. Reverb tails were more natural, easier to place, easier to separate reverb from the “dry” source, especially for vocals. Detail and timbre in all instruments was actually easier to pick out from within the mix. To top it all off – the albums each sounded much more like their artists’ (and their producers’) work. Both albums were far less fatiguing to listen to, while still delivering their inherent detail; and perhaps some sonic gains over previous issues.

Experiment 2: Fixing Album B’s over-compression

First things first – we can’t ever fully reverse what has been done to a damaged audio signal without some trace being left behind. Something will be wrong, whether “audible”, noticeable or not. But, again, an educated guess at the practices likely used, and an ear on the output helped me get somewhere closer to the original dynamics. But how?

Well, it was quite simple. One track from the album has a very insistent hi-hat throughout, that comes from a synth. If we assume that synths of the time were not MIDI controlled, and likely manually-mixed, we can assume that it should essentially sit at a constant level throughout the piece, barring fade-in/fade-out moves. And listening to an “original” that’s pretty much what it does. But neither in the clean nor my “decoded” version of the later album does it do so. It drops up and down in level whenever the other pads and swept instruments come and go. It was more noticeable on my “decoded” version, but with the frequency and micro-dynamic blends being so much more pleasant, I knew that I’d made progress and the way forward was to fix the compression if I could.

Out came a simple expander plug-in; Inserting this before the Dolby decoder, and tweaking various settings until I was happy that the hi-hat was sitting at a constant level throughout my chosen reference piece, restored dynamics to something like the original, and returned that hi-hat to something much closer to a near-constant level as the track plays. In the end, we get something like a 6-9dB gain reduction, and the waveform looks far less squashed. And sounds it, too.

The trick then, was to listen to all four Albums, A, B, A restored, B restored, at similar overall loudness levels, and see which works better. So far, in this house anyways, we’re happier with the restored versions, even including those who are unfamiliar with the artistic content.

Prologue – Is this a mistake? And if so, how could it have happened?

When dealing with remasters, especially for older albums, we typically go back to playing analogue tape. There are *many* things that can go wrong here at a technical level. We’re worrying about whether the tape machine is aligned to the tape itself, both tape and machine are clean, and that the correct noise reduction technology is used, whether we’re actually getting all the information we can off that tape.

Then there is a human element. I’ve lost count of the number of times even in my small sample, where I’ve encountered a DAT or 1/2” reel labelled as being pre-EQ’d or Dolby-encoded with some system or another when in fact it wasn’t. Then there are other similar labelling and human errors I’ve encountered; Perhaps it wasn’t labelled as being Dolby-encoded and it really was. Or perhaps the “safety copy” was actually the clean master and the “master copy” was actually the cruddy “safety” with a 10dB higher noise-floor recorded at half-speed on lower-grade tape on an inferior machine that we know nothing about, with the channels swapped randomly due to a patching error in the studio.

Technology, and technicians, like the kind of questions and answers that have defined, logical “0 or 1”, “yes or no”, “is this right or is this wrong?” kind of answers. Unfortunately for us then, when dealing with music, as with any other art, and so then dealing with musicians, producers and other artists involved with the music creation and production process, we soon find that the lines between “right and wrong” very quickly get blurred.

As an engineer, I’m also all too aware of the dichotomy between my *paying* client (usually the artist), and my *unpaying* client (the listener). Most of the time these are in agreement with what is needed for a project, but sometimes they’re not. The usual issue is the one of being asked for too little dynamic range – “can you turn it up a bit so it sounds as ‘loud’ as everything else?” and the resulting sound is fatiguing even to me as the engineer to work with, let alone the poor saps who’ll be invited to buy it. Sometimes I know that some sounds simply won’t process well to MP3/AAC (that’s less of an issue these days, but still happens).

Anyways – all that to say -if these albums both suffered the same mistake, if indeed it was, then even without the myriad artistic issues creeping in, I can see how an unlabelled, undecoded Dolby-A tape can slip through the net, and blow the ears off an artist or engineer who’s been used to the previous released versions and get people saying “YEAH, LET’S DO THAT ONE!” 🙂